I’ve been seeing a lot of poems about feeding your friends orange slices and freshly baked bread on my feed lately. Snippets about relaxing together in the sunlight that wanders in through the kitchen window, about hungry hands and hungrier seasons.

Truthfully, I’ve never baked you bread or cut you fruit or cooked you soup, I don’t think. Do you even like oranges? In all the tens of thousands of calories I’ve watched you consume, the only time I’ve seen you with a fruit is when you took the lemon slice off your water glass and shoved it down your pants right there in the restaurant with only my body to shield you.

But I know what they mean. Because sometimes “I love you and want us both to eat well” means eating the leftover fries you leave in Noah’s car after we drop you off at the airport. Sometimes eating well means scooping you and I and my little sister frozen yogurt from the carton because it’s 12 am and you’ve run away again. Sometimes eating well is drive-throughs at 5 am in a truck full of all your belongings, both of us giggling-drunk with anger. Sometimes eating well is Doordash still thinking I’m in New York City, a place I’ve never even thought to be, because all your campus dining rooms are closed and you don’t have enough money to buy anything from the convenience store. Sometimes eating well is not eating at all because you’re already on my couch, fast asleep, a bottle of diet tea half-empty beside your hands.

Sometimes eating well means letting you swallow me up the way I’ve swallowed you, so we can keep each other’s bones safe inside the bottom of our oceanic hearts.

By all accounts, we both eat like shit. But I love you, anyway.